I love being married and wouldn’t trade it for anything (Best. Wife. Ever.). But I can see why young men today are so fearful of marriage.
Go read Jennifer Roback Morse evaluates the economics of no-fault divorce by Wintery Knight. It is a major reason for men to be scared of commitment.
It is especially important for unmarried women to understand how no-fault divorce laws and activist family courts dissuade men from marrying. My concern today is that the feminist ideology has become so entrenched that young women will drag themselves through the muck of the sexual revolution without even reflecting on how a string of drunken hook-ups destroys their innocence, vulnerability and capacity to trust and love.
This is not just bad for men, who will increasingly face financial ruin, and loss of access to their own children. No-fault divorce opens the door to totalitarian control of men, women and children by the state. Women who wish to marry and have children will find it increasingly difficult to find men willing to take the risk of marrying and raising children. Women need to consider the incentives created by a Marxist-feminist state.
And besides, when radical feminism convinced women that out-of-wedlock sex (and the inevitable abortions) were evidence of their equal worth to men, the men got the sex they wanted with little if any commitment or responsibility. Something like Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? comes to mind.
If you combine a godless worldview with our current divorce laws, why would any guy take the risks?
There is still a better way, people: Follow God’s plan for sex and marriage — one man, one woman, for life. Easy? No. Worth it? Yes!
Eternity Matters 
First!
I think women need to realize that one of the best ways to make a man like them, totally apart from looks, is to know the challenges he is facing so they can recognize and help. And that means reading books my people like Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse.
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The hook-up culture is the ultimate expression of the triumph of self love over making the emotional investment it takes to grow a relationship over time. It expresses the end goal being the individual having a satisfying sexual experience. The trap is by avoiding relationships where one must make an emotional investment, you become unable over time to ever make that level of commitment. When they are finally ready to settle down they are shocked to discover that they are unable to truly connect with someone. And they lack the opportunities to practice how which is what used to happen when dating, not hooking up, was the norm.
The other critical factor is lack of shared values. By substituting relativism (I won’t make you feel bad and expect you to not make me feel bad and will adjust my values to insure that outcome) they never establish a common foundation to build a relationship over time. Relativism means you are always trying to understand each other’s values, you are aiming at moving targets.
What I find really interesting is the growth of elaborate weddings over the past few decades. It is almost as if people know the marriage might not last so they might as well have a good party at the start. The focus is on the immediate gratification and not the long term success of the relationship. I have nothing against big weddings. And some end up very successfully. But I have attended way too many that I knew the marriage would never make it to the five year mark. Sad.
I think it is less men do not want to get married but that both men and women realize they lack the skills to establish and manage a long term relationship. Too much practice over time focusing on me, not enough practice learning how to focus on “us”.
Regards,
LoneStarJeffe
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Great point about going overboard on the weddings. It is like the increase in wedding spending is directly proportional to the increase in divorces.
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Obvious solution: marry a traditional woman who doesn’t sleep around.
Obvious reason why men don’t take it and instead complain about how horrible the marriage deal is: marrying a traditional woman means that you have to date her, and it’s a long time to go without sex.
No sympathy from this quarter. There are an abundance of good women who would make wonderful wives but get passed over for skinnier, prettier, sluttier, and dumber girls. No sympathy. Zero.
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Hey Theo,
Now you already know that I am chaste, and very thoughtful about how to implement chivalrous courting behavior. For example, consider communication. At one point in a recent friendship I was up to 4 hours a day on weekdays 6 hours on Saturday. I love communicating about vision and marriage and parenting.
But my main point is that the quality of the prospective wife is irrelevant. So long as the laws are made by feminists, the government and courts are there and is incredibly hostile to marriage and family. Whether it is public schools or single-payer health care or whatever, the worldview of the secular left is going to be thrust into the marriage and onto the children. That may be ok for men with no vision, but for men like me it’s a nightmare. It means that I am paying ideologues to undermine the worldview of others as well as the worldview of my children. The money my wife would need for private schools or roses is being stolen for studies on polygamy, greening of government buildings, or taxpayer-funded sex changes.
Marriage-minded women need to realize that big government is not their friend. I have no interest in giving and hazarding all I hath, (to coin a phrase from Shakespeare), so that I can raise little Obamas and Pelosis, or worse lose all access to my children. And that is exactly what tax increases do.
I really enjoy friendship and courtship with women. But that’s as far as I can go under the current laws. I just cannot take a chance on marriage and children.
I know you’re going to disagree – so please try to be nice, I am already very sad about this and bullying isn’t going to help. Solutions would help. Like moving to the moon. That’s a solution. One of my girl friends suggested living under water where the Van Joneses and Kevin Jeningses would not be paid to destroy my family and faith.
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You’re kidding me, right?
Some women need good, pro-family laws to make them behave properly. Some don’t. Marry one of the latter.
Feminism isn’t the problem; or rather, if you think that political, economic, and social equality (i.e. the definition of feminism) is a problem, them the problem lies with you and not with people who happen to not like being repressed because they had the misfortune of not being male.
Feminism didn’t come out of thin air, and it doesn’t enjoy the support of 90% of the female population because of some massive brainwashing. Somehow, I don’t think you would much appreciate it if I were to blame Christians for all the ills of the world… and your knee-jerk anti-feminism is no better.
Final thought: if 90% of women (and a sizeable number of men, too!) call themselves feminists, why should we not be entitled to representation in our laws? Are we supposed to piss off over half of the country because you don’t know how to find a wife?
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So you didn’t understand what I wrote then.
It’s not that I cannot find a good wife, it’s that the rest of the society is being run by leftists that I am paying for to indoctrinate others as well as interfere with my marriage and my children.
For example, this is what the leftist votes of unmarried women gets us:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/55583
In any case, I will not be bullied. The conditions are no good for marriage due to the voting of unmarried women who wanted to replace men with social programs. I, for one, choose to respond to this with chastity. There are other ways to serve the Lord than marriage and children.
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“In any case, I will not be bullied.”
I think they have already succeeded in bullying you against marriage and it will suit them just fine. What with Christian men citing big government for their reluctance to get married and the good traditional, conservative Christian women, despite their good qualities will remain unmarried because Christian men think compared to big governments their quality don’t matter, the said big government will propose it’s agenda of sex-outside-wedlock, pregnancies-outside-wedlock, abortions, same-sex marriage and all that without any resistance. Why? Because Christian men shied away from marriage and now there are only the immoral who will live and the world will be a nasty place to live in. But who cares, Christians won’t be living by that time! I don’t see THAT serving the Lord.
Sorry if I sounded mean, but in this instance I think Theo makes a whole lot of sense.
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I mean I won’t be bullied by “Christian” women who don’t understand why a Christian man should not want to marry in these conditions. And nothing I’ve read here has alleviated my concerns. Quite the contrary. I can do better for God by staying chaste. I would feel more comfortable if women knew about these concerns, and were actively engaged in addressing them, rather than in attacking me.
I am am talking about in the West, by the way, so that I am not accused of generalizing.
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Well, you said that 90% of women of all ages are the problem. Why should they help you?
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Well, they don’t share my worldview, which values marriage and children, so I am not sure that they have a moral obligation to help me to have a Christian influence on the world through my marriage and parenting.
But I am not saying that non-Christians have an obligation to help me. I am saying that as a matter of fact, they do not help me, so I can make a decision about what I will do with my skills and fortune.
Having a family is expensive, and there is continuous pressure to kick your wife out of the house to work and put the kids into public education. Government keeps spending and taxing to make sure that wives don’t stay home, that bureaucrats have money to buy votes by creating welfare programs, that social engineers meddle into family business imposing their secular left values, and that children are separated from the influence of their parents and placed under the control of secular socialist unionized care-givers and teachers. I could go on, and on, and on, and on, and on. The forces arrayed against me are many, and 90% of unmarried women voted to give those forces my money – the money I would have used to have a maid clean house once a week.
I wanted a fully-qualified woman like Jennifer Roback Morse or Michele Bachmann to be my wife and mother to my children and to influence public policy to protect our family from external threats using their skills.
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For heaven’s sake, WK, get a grip on reality.
I went to a dinner tonight, sponsored by a super-conservative group in my state. The keynote speaker is a prominent politician – Christian, grandfather, pro-life, anti-gay-marriage – as right-wing as they come. After discussing the evils of the day and the need to strengthen families, did he talk about how men shouldn’t marry? about how divorce and tax laws mean that marriage is somehow bad?
Hell, no! He ended up his address by telling young people to marry and make it work. His attitude was that so long as two people are willing to work through the tough times, that marriage is a great thing and ultimately worthwhile.
Funny – the grandfather of over a dozen munchkins and someone who lives and breathes the culture wars every single day doesn’t think that marriage is a raw deal for men or women. Yet I’m supposed to believe that every single marriage in America is doomed because women had the audacity to ask for equal pay in the office? Reality check is… coming up negative.
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You’re very funny and snarky, but it just won’t do. Perhaps if you showed some recognition of the needs of men, the vision men have for marriage and children as part of a Christian life plan. Or even if you showed some awareness of the kinds of threat posed by no-fault divorce, sex education, big government secularism, and big government socialism.
Let me be clear. I am not obligated to marry, I am obligated to serve the Lord. Sure, I can think of ways that marriage and child-raising could help the Lord. But I look into the future and see that more and more purchasing power is being transferred from me to others because of the votes of leftists, including many unmarried women who prefer government to husbands.
At this time the probabilities are in favor of the secularists who run the centers of influence, like public schools, courts, media, etc. And single women are woefully unaware of all of this. So it’s better for me to stay chaste and focus my fortune on changing the culture. I am not obligated to marry when women have no knowledge of and interest in what it takes to make a marriage and raise children.
Marriage and parenting are not about recreation. Some knowledge is required. And women can start by having conversations with men about what they want to accomplish with marriage and children. I know what I wanted to accomplish, and in my judgment, it is not feasible in this time and place.
Otherwise, women can go on aborting babies or raising them without fathers. If they want to marry the federal government and impoverish good men with massive tax burdens, be my guest. It’s no problem for me.
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Already got your first paragraph down. You, like a lot of knee-jerk reactionaries of both sides, see a label (like “feminist”) and ascribe all sorts of your own baggage to it. That’s your baggage, not my lack of understanding.
Unless you are a polygamist, it hardly matters what “women” believe; it matters what exactly one woman, singular, your future wife, believes.
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You get the last word, I explained already that the individual woman I would marry was not the main problem.
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Some women need good, pro-family laws to make them behave properly. Some don’t. Marry one of the latter
I am going to use that.
Like Christians though, some feminists are a problem.
A small number of feminists have managed to indoctrinate a lot of young people of both sexes on the evils of men. In some cases this becomes a self-fulfiling prophecy.
I know some young men who are convinced that men can not be faithful, therefore they think it is futile to try to be. One of them told my wife that she is foolish to think the I have been faithful all these years. Actually I have been. They think that I am either a liar or abnormal.
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Interesting comment thread! At the risk of sounding like I’m disagreeing with myself, the point of the post wasn’t to discourage men from marrying, especially Christian men. As Theobromophile noted, just seek out the right kind of partner. Your odds will go up dramatically.
I think Christians should marry if they have a desire to do so and have kids. It is all quite biblical. The standards for a partner should be biblical, but expecting the perfect mate would be illogical.
I was just pointing out that, on average, people in general and women in particular shouldn’t be surprised if men have more disincentives than they used to regarding marriage.
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Untrue.
90% of ALL women self-identify as feminists. Most of the rest of the remaining 10% agree with the central notions of the movement – i.e. equality between the sexes. Nevertheless, 90% of women don’t vote for progressive, socialistic policies.
You do not like the progressive movement, but that isn’t the same thing as the feminist movement, no matter how much the progressives may like to play dress-up.
Let me explain it to you like this, WK: almost everyone here is a raging conservative (myself included… note that 90% of women are not liberals). Most KKK members are raging conservatives. Any thinking, compassionate member of our movement despises them and understands that there is nothing intrinsically or latently racist about conservatism, no matter how much the racists play dress-up in our movement – a movement which is actually antithetical to racism.
The same is true of feminism and the progressive movement. That you choose to not see that fairly basic point is either bigotry or a blind spot – a blind spot large enough to be seen with the Hubble.
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And I should probably stop, but it pisses me off beyond all belief…
Neil once said that I’m a pro-choicer’s worst nightmare: young, intelligent, engineer, female, not religious. To me, that shows the hollowness of their arguments: the existence (or lack thereof) of a type of person shouldn’t be a precondition to the soundness of the justification for the ideals.
Likewise, that the existence of literally millions – millions, Wintery – conservative feminists throws a monkey wrench into your anti-feminist ideology says something about how well you’ve thought that one through.
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Here are the numbers:
http://wvwv.org/research-items/unmarried-women-change-america
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AND LOOK AT THE CHARTS.
And it’s not JUST that unmarried women vote overwhelmingly for socialism. It’s not just fiscal issues, including global warming. It’s social issues and foreign policy issues, as well.
I’ll name a few: abortion, same-sex marriage, the domestic violence industry, human rights commissions, and no-fault divorce. There are many more issues. I am facing a huge majority of women voting for policies that are antithetical to my worldview and my vision. Policies that cost me money and are a threat to my liberty, including my religious liberty. Policies that make the thought of marriage and children irrational and unfeasible.
But these sorts of calculations are never entered into by unmarried women as far as I can tell. They don’t even know what incentives they are creating when they vote the way they do – because they don’t understand any of these issues.
Feminism has as its core goal the destruction of the family and the raising of children by the secular socialist state. A sensible man will understand that the feminists have won, and the traditional family is now dead. A sensible man will stay clear of women who hate men and children and who are willing to bring the state in to regulate the behavior of men and children.
Today we are seeing the social costs for those who study these things. So, the sensible man will stay clear of any relationships in which he is exposing himself to the power of the state. If you and I were to sit down and talk about these things, I have no doubt that you will not be aware of the facts on any of these issues. Even if you are, the vast majority of women are not aware. Even if they were, they are not lifting a finger to stop it.
The smart play for men is to stay away until women begin to look into these issues in earnest and understand the obligations that marriage and parenting create on their behavior, including the obligation to vote the right way and make moral decisions.
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Wrong.
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I’ve concluded that conversations on “feminism” aren’t terribly productive unless terms are carefully defined.
Other than the small minority of true misogynists, I think that most people would claim to be pro-women’s rights. The ranges of that phrase and the term feminism are so broad that they could include pro-life and pro-abortion people, though.
I’m not up to the task of parsing the terms, mind you, just pointing out why using overly broad terms tends to doom conversations.
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Agreed, BUT.
First, the definition of “feminism” is the belief in the political, economic, and social equality of women. It should be a broad term, because it is meant to represent the interests of 150 million women and girls in America. Unlike other terms, it makes sense to fight for this one as being about the interests of women, since feminists claim to speak for all women. You’re not going to let “Christian” be defined in such a way so as to exclude you, Neil, because that’s a term that represents you and something you speak for. The same is true of feminism.
True… although I’ve met some people who think that women really are inferiour to men (more emotional, less rational, dumber, should not be the head of a house, etc).
There are waves of feminism… and it’s often helpful to discuss in terms of that. For example, first-wave feminists (or, colloquially, old-school feminists) are generally pro-life, pro-women’s education (but real education – not fluffy Peace and Justice Studies degrees), and pro-family. (That’s a good chunk of women out there.) On the opposite end, you get the progressives who dress up their ideology in feminist clothing to give it moral sanction. It pisses me off, to no end, when people treat the entire movement as if we are all thinking like the progressives… it’s wrong in so many ways. (Best way to explain, again, is that it’s like saying that all Christians should support socialised medicine.)
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I definitely see how you wouldn’t want to be lumped in with progressives. And it is a good parallel with the classical Christian / liberal Christian issue — sort of like, “Hey, gimme that word back! We had it first!”
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First wave feminists are OK. All my favorite women are strong and well-educated. I am talking about third-wave feminists.
Please don’t reply, this is just a clarification.
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And a sensible woman will stay away from men who hate them, because sensible people don’t interact with those who dislike them.
You’re kidding me, right? Neil – care to actually come to my defence on this one?
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D’oh! I’ve been trying to stay out of this one, and just noted why in a previous comment. But for the record, Theobromophile is quite well informed and one should not assume that she isn’t aware of any particular facts. I think you both would be like minded on quite a few issues.
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I have to give her the last word. Naturally I disagree with everything she says, and I think this due to differing degrees of knowledge. She and I are reading different people. If Theo wants to get some book recommendations from me, I will be more than happy to oblige. I appreciate the way she debates though. I really, really appreciate being able to express a strong disagreement like this with impunity, so her stock has certainly gone up with me, even though she is 100% wrong.
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Anyone would like to listen to a great 15 minute podcast by Dr. Morse can download this MP3:
[audio src="http://media.libsyn.com/media/ruthinstitute/CNP_10-17.mp3" /]
She is FAR more optimistic about marriage than I am. And, truth be told, if I met a prospective mate who understood these issues as well as she does, then I would have no doubts at all about marrying – in ANY society, no matter how big and intrusive the government. But that’s a tall order.
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These two lectures from Dr. J are particularly useful for those with a law background.
[audio src="http://media.libsyn.com/media/ruthinstitute/Sep02_09.mp3" /]
(63 minutes)
[audio src="http://media.libsyn.com/media/ruthinstitute/June23_09.mp3" /]
(76 minutes)
They were delivered to several hundred law students from all over the country under the auspices of Blackstone Legal Fellowship and the Alliance Defense Fund.
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Neil – I have a limited tolerance of people claiming that I’m ignorant, as do I have a limited tolerance of people claiming that I’m “100% wrong.” It’s doubly worse when it’s from my own side; if I wanted to hear this b.s., I would head over to some progressive, pro-abort website.
So pardon me if I bow out of this (and future) conversations.
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Well, I apologize for being too mean. I was being overly snarky because I was having so much fun disagreeing with you and I went too far, please accept my apologies, and don’t blame Neil for my pig-headedness.
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